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A small group of fanatics plan to hijack a memorial event on Sunday ostensibly dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died in an attack last year at Fort Hood, Texas. The event will feature speakers with a long history of vicious anti-Islamic bigotry and rhetoric that targets not the actions of terrorists but rather condemns the religion of Islam itself.

As I've reported recently, conservatives, spurred by the ahistorical renderings of Newt Gingrich and others, wrap the exceptionalism narrative into a pat us-versus-them package: that Obama doesn't understand the divine roots of the American founding, probably because he's not really a Christian and not really an American, and only by electing the likes of Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint can we ensure that the Christian nation ship can be righted again.

By framing the confrontation of this narrative as an "uphill battle," Democrats make the enormous and unnecessary mistake of placing themselves in the position of the counter-cultural underdog. The conservatives have no special right to own the American exceptionalism narrative, and Democrats shouldn't yield that ground to them. They need an America narrative of their own, one that is just as forceful and unapologetic as the right's.

quote of the day from David Lane, executive director of AFA Action, responding to the win in Iowa: "For those who impose what we perceive as an immoral agenda, we're going to take them out" ... He said the group would do so again wherever judges "impose their will on free people."

Outside anti-gay organizations like the American Family Association, Family Research Council, Alliance Defense Fund, Faith & Freedom Coalition and National Organization for Marriage spent more than $1 million targeting three Iowa Supreme Court justices for defeat over the court's ruling in favor of marriage equality ...

The Religious Right's "Judge Bus" continues to roll through Iowa and participants just keep coming up with wilder and wilder explanations of why three Supreme Court justices need to be removed from office, like Rep. Steve King claiming that if they aren't, pretty soon we'll have a society in which children will be taken away from parents and raised in warehouses to be vicious warriors ... or something

Roman Catholic leaders in Iowa are urging voters to back a constitutional convention, saying the rare gathering would be the quickest way to overturn the court ruling that legalized gay marriage in the state, the Associated Press reports.

The Iowa Catholic Conference, which represents the state's four Roman Catholic dioceses, issued the statement Monday in favor of a yes vote on a Nov. 2 ballot question that would require a constitutional convention.

Gay marriage has been legal in Iowa since 2009, when the state Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that found a same-sex marriage ban approved by lawmakers violated the Iowa Constitution. Since then, about 1,800 same-sex weddings have been held in Iowa, most by couples who live in other states.

Tom Chapman, executive director of the Catholic Conference, said the group was part of a larger effort to encourage Iowa's roughly 500,000 Catholics to vote their conscience on a number of issues.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Wednesday defended Iowa’s method of selecting judges and urged voters to reject an effort to remove three state Supreme Court justices who joined in a unanimous decision striking down a ban on gay

On the surface, “protecting marriage” looks legitimate. In fact, people who otherwise weren’t anti-gay might open the message, read it, and believe it, without understanding the malicious imperative behind it. They might think about “protecting children” from threats against “traditional marriage” and without truly understanding what they’re doing, they install a virus that’s designed to infect and control them by quietly running in the background and executing the commands of its master application, that of the hate-filled and morally disapproving religious political action groups who launched it. What Californians may not know is that the real purpose behind the Prop 8 Trojan is total domination of our collective operating system by hijacking the U.S. Constitution and maligning its 1st Amendment guarantees to the separation between church and state.

Regardless of the final disposition of the gay marriage case, what the California trial and the ruling of Judge Walker most immediately called to mind for me was Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al, litigated and decided in 2005 (and chronicled in stirring detail by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker). The constitutional and substantive issues in the two cases were not the same, of course.

But there are some striking similarities between the California and Dover cases and these are instructive for appreciating the nature of the contemporary right in America and of contemporary political discourse......[I]n each case, when a favored position of the right-wing was subject to thorough-going, fact-based scrutiny, that position wasn't merely found wanting, but was utterly demolished....

After listening to expert scientific testimony for six weeks, including from the leading "scholars" in the field of intelligent design, Judge Jones [in the Kitzmiller case]ruled that ID was...nothing more than a cover for creationism,... [and he] noted that the religious nature of intelligent design would be readily apparent to an adult or child.

Likewise, in the California case, the presiding Judge, after hearing copious expert testimony as to the "facts" of gay marriage and its effects children specifically and society generally, found that the proponents of Proposition 8 (those opposed to gay marriage) simply had no factual case.... Consequently, the court ruled, there was no rational, secular state interest to be advanced by the ban on gay marriage, only the perpetuation of prejudice (or, more charitably, of a religious "principle" not reasonably related to any compelling secular purpose).

Weiler is right to not conflate a legal victory with a victory in public opinion or perception.

A finding of fact in a formal legal setting does not demonstrate the efficacy of facts in the context of political discourse. In fact, corrections to misinformation or the presenting of facts in a political context--i.e., one without a great deal of critical thinking--can actually backfire and cause the further entrenchment of misinformed beliefs.

In a society in which partisanship is rank and pervasive, and in which partisan political communication is:

2. psychologically gratifying to the primary audience (i.e., the communication confirms the preconceptions of the audience, flatters the audience subtly, or both)

rulings against Creationism or same-sex marriage bans can fail to change minds, and can actually be cited by anti-science and anti-gay marriage operators to support their messaging.

For instance, permit this speculation: the religious right is presenting the Dover case not as evidence of solid reasoning but as evidence of American cultural decline, willful back-turning against God by the nation, scientists, or an unsaved judge, or even evidence of a global, more-than-a-century old conspiracy--or mass, even partially subconscious self-delusion--relative to the evidence and reasoning accumulated and reconfirmed on a daily basis by biological, geological, archaeological, astronomical, and physics experimentation, testing and observations (and, when relevant, mathematical modeling) executed by professionals who are trained in skepticism, sometimes eager to disprove one another's findings, and fully aware that the ultimate prize and prestige in science goes to those who overturn long-held conclusions.

Evidence demands a verdict, and in the political communication efforts of the religious right, the evidence of Judge Jones's ruling in the Dover case does not further a verdict that the earth is billions of years old, that the universe is expanding, that there's only one biological language for all of life (i.e., DNA), that genetics points to common ancestry for organisms.... No. The verdict is: "What we've thought all along is always going to be right."